Nicola Ballotta is an Italian engineering leader with 25+ years of internet industry experience, currently serving as Director of Cloud at Namecheap where he built EasyWP — one of the world's most affordable managed WordPress hosting platforms — from prototype to production. He is best known as the creator of The Hybrid Hacker, a newsletter that grew from zero to 30,000 subscribers in 18 months before being acquired by Refactoring in June 2024. The combined publication now reaches 120,000+ readers and serves a 900+ member private community of engineering leaders.
Anne Helen Petersen is an American journalist, culture critic, and author best known for her newsletter Culture Study and her book 'Can't Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation.' Holding a PhD in Media Studies from UT Austin, she went from academic celebrity-gossip historian to BuzzFeed News Senior Culture Writer before launching one of Substack's most-read newsletters. She writes about the structural forces — work culture, consumerism, loneliness, burnout — that shape everyday life, blending academic rigor with deeply personal, accessible prose. She now lives on Lummi Island, Washington, with her partner Charlie Warzel and their dogs.
Dr. James Stanier is a computer science PhD turned engineering leader, author of three books on engineering management, and the mind behind The Engineering Manager newsletter with nearly 30,000 subscribers. He scaled Brandwatch's engineering team from startup to a $450M acquisition, led hundreds of engineers at Shopify, and now serves as CTO for the veterinary division at Nordhealth. His work distills what it actually takes to go from writing code to running organizations - without losing the technical edge.
Thorsten Ball is a German software engineer, author, and technical educator best known for his self-published books 'Writing an Interpreter in Go' and 'Writing a Compiler in Go', which have become go-to resources for developers wanting to understand programming language internals. With over two decades of professional software development experience, he currently works at Sourcegraph on Amp, an AI-powered coding agent. He also writes the weekly newsletter 'Register Spill', covering systems programming, developer tools, and the intersection of AI with software engineering.
Zapier is the world's leading workflow automation platform, connecting 9,000+ apps so businesses can automate repetitive tasks without writing a single line of code. Founded in 2011 by three University of Missouri graduates, it became a $5 billion company on just $2.68 million in funding - one of the most capital-efficient growth stories in tech. Today, 69% of Fortune 1000 companies use Zapier, which has processed over 81 billion automated tasks and is rapidly evolving into a full AI orchestration platform.
Luna House is Cascais' most-loved coliving and coworking hub — a boutique B&B with nine private rooms in summer, a digital nomad village with community programming in winter. Founded in 2022 by Olena (Lena) Matveieva, it offers coworking for 25 people with 120mb/sec fibre, an event studio, team workation packages, and a resident dog named Luna who consistently out-reviews the human staff.